July 2004

Email Marketing or Email Selling?

Getting permission is only the start. Then the hard work begins - keeping recipients loyal and happy.

The escalation of spam and virus-carrying emails, together with tougher legislation, has made life increasingly difficult for legitimate UK email marketers in recent months.

But here's another challenge. Let's say you build a bona fide, permission-based list of email subscribers. Everything seems to go well for a few months. The unsubscribe rate is close to zero, but something's wrong. Perhaps the same offer that worked so well a few months back bombed this time around. Maybe the open rate has dropped, or it's getting harder to get people to click through. Perhaps the pass-along rate has fallen.

Whatever the symptoms, the overall picture is the same. Your list may appear to be growing, but in reality you are losing people.

The scenario is by no means uncommon. As the percentage of the UK population online reaches its natural status quo, things are quite different from a few years ago when email marketing was still a novelty. Then, you only had to launch an email newsletter and people signed up with interest, read them from start to finish and even corresponded with the author.

Now, particularly in some industries, email alerts are standard, and the email newsletter has in many cases been reduced to a sales vehicle as businesses come to realise the cost of a long-term commitment to quality content.

Even when you get permission to market to people, they can only cope with so many commercial email relationships. Email marketers are competing not only for recipients' attention but for their loyalty. The ultimate customer-retention tool needs - guess what - a customer-retention strategy for itself.

So what makes an email relationship last? Or to look at it from another angle, what email marketing tactics are likely to push people away?

According to research conducted by Quris late last year, the number one turn-off factor, cited by 68% of the sample, is emails coming too frequently. What's this? Surely we're always told people have to see an ad seven times or more before its message sinks in? Isn't frequency a key factor in brand recall? Not so in the case of permission email, it seems.

The principle of bombardment does not apply to this proactive, 'lean-forward' medium. The lesson appears to be: tell subscribers at the point of signing up exactly what they can expect - what you will send and how often - and everyone will avoid nasty surprises.

The next most-quoted reason was that they had lost interest in the product/service or topic. Situations change and people move on. The reasons for loss of interest may be legitimate and outside the control of the marketer. But many are not.

It's too easy to stick to the same formula, re-use old content, allow sales messages to dominate, forget that subscribers are actually your brand ambassadors and as such should be listened to. They frequently need motivating and incentivising. Offer them a real connection. People form emotional attachments to email newsletters (see my article in last month's MK). That needs proactive management.

All too often, email marketing is actually nothing more than email selling. When that happens, a valuable customer relationship management tool is lost, reduced to nothing more than a series of cheap flyers.